The Unity of Sense and Mind: A Review of Cross-domain Mapping

If the sound of a trombone had a taste, would it be bitter? In what way is solving a puzzle like navigating a relationship? People consistently map information across sensory modalities and conceptual domains. Such cross-sensory and cross-conceptual mappings have tended to be studied separately. We argue here that these mappings share underlying mechanisms and are more interconnected than previously thought. We present evidence that these mappings arise from a combination of statistical learning, magnitude matching, valence matching, and semantic mediation, involving an interplay between perception and conception. By bringing cross-sensory and cross-conceptual mappings into a common framework, we offer new insights into how people represent similarity and highlight promising avenues for understanding how humans discover and create connections across seemingly disparate domains.